A global team of scientists led by the Technical University of Denmark’s National Space Institute (DTU Space) PhD student Andrew Mayo discovered 95 new exoplanets, which are based outside the solar system.

The discovery was made through data provided by Nasa’s K2 Kepler telescope, thereby bringing the total number of new exoplanets found by the mission to 300.

Nasa launched the telescope in 2009, with an aim of searching exoplanets in a single patch of sky, but the telescope stopped functioning after suffering a mechanical failure in 2013.

The European Space Agency (ESA) entered an agreement with the Canadian Space Agency to convert the existing Swarm constellation into a four-satellite mission to obtain additional information on space weather and features such as the aurora borealis.

As part of the deal, ESA’s three identical Swarm satellites, which have been in orbit since 2013, will be integrated with Canada’s Cassiope satellite.

The existing Swarm satellites currently provide a range of information regarding the origin of Earth’s magnetic field and how it protects the planet’s habitats from dangerous electrically charged atomic particles in the solar wind.

New research conducted by a team of aerospace engineers at the UK-based University of Bristol revealed that an acoustic blockage-detection system can avert future accidents by alerting pilots of a blocked Pitot before the situation becomes critical.

As part of the study, the researchers examined whether the traditional acoustic methods of detecting blockages in pipes or ears of newborn babies could be used in case of real aircraft Pitot tubes that can contain irregular shapes and passages.

The researchers also studied the potential of traditional acoustic methods in discovering common blockage types such as tape, ice and insects.

Three UK companies are set to help the European Space Agency (ESA) in the concept development for a future mission that seeks to reduce the global risk of damage caused by space weather.

As part of the ESA mission, a spacecraft is expected to be put at a fixed point away from the line between the Sun and the Earth, called the 5th Lagrange point, to monitor the rapidly changing solar activity and provide early warnings of possibly harmful space weather.

The three UK companies engaging in the project are Airbus UK, STFC RAL Space and UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory.